Gabriel Rodríguez-Ramos, the incisive lawyer of Isabel Díaz’s boyfriend Ayuso – or Don Alberto, as Miguel Ángel Rodríguez claims to be called -, attempted a certain gesture of perplexity, as if something unknown was being revealed to him, when, last Tuesday, at the hearing of the trial before the State Attorney General, his communications director, Mar Hedo, let him say:
—In Spain there are many leaks.
In the courts, of course, there have been hundreds. They were almost never investigated. There were also in this same open process to prosecute a leak. What has been disclosed are not exactly minor details nor ones that do not infringe on people’s privacy, as is alleged in the case that has captured much of the national news over the past year. As the State Prosecutor’s Office, which defends the public prosecutor Álvaro García Ortiz, underlined in its opening statement of the trial, during the investigation, data such as the defendant’s home and email address entered the hands of others. Another of the extraordinary events surrounding this trial: the investigation into who sent to the press the document in which the lawyer of Mr. Alberto González Amador confessed to a fraud against the Treasury, placed García Ortiz, head of the public prosecutor and sixth authority of the State, on the bench of the Supreme Court.
Since it is about a leak and how it reached the trial without the investigating judge Ángel Hurtado being able to find anything resembling evidence for the prosecution, the journalists became key witnesses. Yesterday they declared six and next week they will declare six more. Two of them reiterated what they had already told Hurtado and he decided to ignore it, claiming that it did not give them credibility: that they both knew that González Amador’s lawyer had sent a letter to the Madrid Prosecutor’s Office acknowledging his fraud against the Treasury before this document reached García Ortiz. The defense uses it as crucial information to demonstrate that the secret García Ortiz is accused of having leaked was no such secret. One of the witnesses, José Precedo, of elDiario.esthe first to publish the news of Ayuso’s boyfriend’s scam, went further: he said that he could not reveal his source, but that he was in no way the accused.
In the Supreme Court room where the trial is taking place, a distant echo of the show starring Miguel Ángel Rodríguez (MÁR) and his journalism lessons persisted. Ayuso’s chief of staff devoted himself to discrediting the whistleblowers who uncovered Don Alberto’s fraud. And to justify his hoax according to which the Prosecutor’s Office would have frustrated an agreement with González Amador in March 2024 “by order from above”, with a “bad and dirty” maneuver – which provoked the reaction of the prosecutor who brought García Ortiz to the bench -, Rodríguez defended a bizarre concept of journalism: a sort of license to lie. “It was a message without support from any source. I am a journalist and I work in politics. I am not a notary who needs any certification,” he said smugly.
With these premises, Precedo did more than explain his relationship with the case: he defended the professionalism of his work and the dignity of good journalism. “We control everything we publish, even if something else was said here yesterday. When journalists are attacked here, they are called liars, their reputation is being played with,” he shouted. “Sometimes this makes you post things later, but it makes you sleep a lot easier.”
As he had already stated in the investigation, the elDiario.es journalist reiterated that since March 6, 2024, he had a screenshot of the email in which González Amador’s lawyer admitted his client’s crimes. That is, a week before it was sent to the attorney general. The private prosecution’s strategy was to erode the witness’s credibility. And he punctuated it with the question, formulated in a thousand ways, why he had published it only a week later. Precedo explained that the source who provided him with all the documentation in the case did not allow him to make public use of that email. And that he didn’t give his permission until it started appearing in other media.
The journalist admitted that he has had a professional relationship with García Ortiz for 20 years, since they both worked in Galicia. One of the popular accusations attempted to discredit him on that side. He was greeted with a strong statement: “I was never handed a piece of paper.” And then, at the end of almost an hour and a half of interrogation, the journalist, in a slightly emotional tone, declared something else:
—I have a moral dilemma, because I know who the source is.
The president of the court, Andrés Martínez Arrieta, reacted with a strange verb:
-Don’t threaten us…
—I don’t threaten anything. I say I know who the source is, but I can’t reveal it, and this creates a moral dilemma for me because here an innocent person is being asked to go to prison.
The defense received good news once again with the testimony of Alfonso Pérez Medina, judicial correspondent of La Sexta. During the investigation, this journalist had already provided a screenshot of an internal chat within his editorial team which recorded that at 9.54pm. on March 13 he had already communicated to his colleagues the news that Ayuso’s boyfriend had proposed an agreement to the Madrid Prosecutor’s Office for Economic Crimes in which he recognized the crimes. That is, five minutes before the confirmation email was sent to the State Attorney General, on alert to collect data to disprove the hoax that MÁR was spreading at that same moment. Pérez Medina said he did not have the email, but had confirmed its contents from three different sources. This was published a few minutes later on the La Sexta website.
The La Sexta journalist asked these questions after half an hour earlier El Mundo had released another information, in this case incorrect: that it was the Prosecutor’s Office that offered the agreement to González Amador and not the other way around. The author of the news, Esteban Urreiztieta, also released a statement. Although it did not conform to reality, Urreiztieta defended his approach by pointing out that he only managed to obtain one more email in which the Prosecutor’s Office showed itself willing to negotiate the agreement. That communication had been provided that same morning by González Amador to Ayuso’s chief of staff, as both admitted. But when questioned by the defence, the El Mundo journalist underlined something else: that he had already known for some time from various sources that the partner of the Madrid president had the “will” to reach an agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office which would imply “the admission of the crimes” and sanctions which would not imply her going to prison.
Urreiztieta wanted to clarify that he never gave rise to the fabrications that MÁR was trying to peddle about an alleged political intervention to avoid the agreement with González Amador. Other media, however, bought it that same night of March 13th. Journalists from two of them, Vozpópuli and Libertad Digital, also appeared at the trial. Both published an almost identical headline: “The Prosecutor’s Office offered Ayuso’s boyfriend a deal which he later withdrew due to orders from above.” They were exactly the same words that Rodríguez used in his campaign agitprop on social media and in chats with journalists. The hoax was presented as a true fact without attributing the statements to the right hand of the Madrid president. Those appearing at the trial limited themselves to appealing to the right to protect their sources. The day ended after offering a taste of the best and worst of journalism.
